Should the EU agreed to a transit exit period of two years? Which ultimately kicks Brexit down the road.

Should a time-limited prolongation of Union acquis be considered, this would require existing Union regulatory, budgetary, supervisory, judiciary and enforcement instruments and structures to apply.

For the most part there is a shared interest in continuing arrangements, since many nations will not want to lose preferential access terms to the UK.

So yes the EU should grant more time provided the UK continues to meet its obligations.

It is obvious that a clean break without any transit arrangements would be better for both. God forbid we start going down the road of one set of rules for the transit and another set to leave.

Why ?

Because without England clearly identifying what it wants it to do we are opening a Pandora box.

It is the UK that wants to leave the EU not the other way around.

As I have already said in previous posts only the Lawyers will make hay, never mind the terms for the fish. They will love a transit period with Tax payers money on both sides flowing into their coffers. The longer the better.

The EU has it hands tied when it comes to any negotiation because it must reflect the fact that the advantages of EU membership are not available to outsiders.

It may be possible for the EU and UK to collaborate on finding a smooth transition at the WTO. But it will require consensus at some point, a vulnerability open to exploitation. Britain’s most important external agreements — nuclear, airline access, fisheries and financial services are either entirely, or in large part, handled by the EU.

Even if England creates a new trade department, the task of negotiating new free-trade deals and maintaining existing ones will require a huge amount of money and manpower. The civil service and ministers are not even close to being ready to negotiate, let alone implement, new global trading relationships.

The nearest precedent you can think of is a cessation of a country.

Britain will find itself at the diplomatic starting line, with the status quo upended and all sides reassessing their interests. After Brexit the UK will lose more than 750 international arrangements. Even if it were simple to renegotiate these arrangements, it will open a bureaucratic vortex, sapping energy and resources, creating a huge legal tangle.

The big question is, how will the UK’s political system react once the realization has sunk in about how little the EU will ultimately offer?

What Mrs May really wants is an association agreement.

There is a strong political case for such an association agreement, also from an EU perspective. But I fear that the idea is time-inconsistent. There is no Goldilocks “creative solution”, or a sector-by-sector approach.

There is no way that the EU will agree freedom of movement for aircraft, for example, but not for passengers.

Businesses need to prepare. Two more years before having to move key employees to European capitals.

The EU only knows a very limited number of external relationships. There is the European Economic Area, the so-called Norway option full EU access in exchange for accepting all EU rules. It’s a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), which means full access to the single market but being under all EU rules.

The other is a customs union agreement — the Turkey option.

The EU will not offer the UK the “Swiss option”. It regrets having offered it to Switzerland. Then there is the Canada option – It took hundreds of skilled negotiators, dozens of video conferences and seemingly endless days in Brussels to produce the 1,600-page text. Some seven years after Canada and the EU began negotiating a trade deal, the future of the agreement remains shrouded in doubt. The agreement – which has yet to be ratified.

This leaves a single option: a free-trade agreement.

On top of all this the EU is only just starting to talk about institutional reform.

And how can they deal seriously with a government in which the foreign secretary might at any moment move to topple the prime minister to further his own career?

To continental ears, Mrs May’s call for a unique economic partnership sounds suspiciously like another, albeit subtler, attempt for Britain to have its cake and eat it — to retain the privileges but not the responsibilities of EU membership.

The British now believe they have made reassuring noises on money, security and citizens’ rights. But the insistence that the UK will leave the customs union means that it will be hard to point to progress on another issue that the EU deems critical: the Irish border.

The future relationship will need to be based on a balance of rights and obligations. It will need to respect the integrity of the Union’s legal order and the autonomy of its decision-making.

History has the habit of repeating itself, Britain has been a torn in the side of the EU ever since it joined and English treaties have proven themselves over its history to be not worth the paper they are written on.

Get rid of the Nigel Farage’s, Renew your membership, i.e. stay and fight your quarter, otherwise a Clean Brake would be best for all.